Toilets of the Crusaders

The Crusades

The Crusades were a brutal time.
European leaders organized enormous military operations
sanctioned by the Roman Pope and intended
to slaughter heretics and thereby gain God's favor,
political power, and enormous wealth.
The Crusades started by trying to retake the Holy Land
from the Moslem Arabs.
Later Crusades found that other varieties of Christians
were equally eligible targets, and sometimes far more
convenient and less powerful militarily.
The Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204 never
made it past Constantinople, it was dedicated to increasing
the political power and wealth of the Doge of Venice and
the German King of Swabia.
The advanced society of Byzantium was sacked and largely
destroyed by forces which were, relatively speaking,
barbarians from the northwest.
The Albigensian Crusade of 1209-1229 was
a military campaign started by Pope Innocent III to
eliminate the Christian heresy of Catharism, which
was accomplished the Cathars of southern France.
The Northern Crusades of 1198-1290 had
German forces fighting Russian Orthodox forces and
slaughtering pagan Baltic people.
The Children's Crusade of 1212 was an
especially disastrous episode in which European Christians
got the idea of sending children to fight the Muslims
in the Holy Land.

It was not a proud time for Europeans leaders who were
portraying themselves as wonderful Christians.

Bodrum Castle

What today is the harbor in the Turkish town of
Bodrum had been a fortification as far back
as Doric times, around 1110 BC,
and was the site of the palace of
King Mausulos.
His enormous
tomb,
completed in 353 BC,
is the source of our word "Mausoleum".
Back then the city was known as Halicarnassus.

The
Knights Hospitalier, also known as the
Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem,
were based on
Rhodes
and they wanted another stronghold on the mainland to defend
against the Seljuk Turks.

In 1404 AD
the Knights Hospitalier
began building the Castle of Saint Peter at
Halicarnassus
on the site of a small 11th century Seljuk castle.
By then the port city was known as
Bodrum,
as it is today.
Construction workers were promised in 1409 that a
papal degree guaranteed them a reservation in Heaven.
By 1437 they had completed the outer wall.

Seige warfare had been common since ancient times.
The limiting factor in a seige is drinking water.
The Knights included fourteen cisterns for collecting
rainwater in their castle.

These are some of the Crusaders' toilets

The growing Ottoman Empire attacked the castle,
first in 1453 after the fall of Constantinople
and again in 1480 under Sultan Mehmed II.

Just two years later in 1482, Mehmed II had died and his son
Bayezid II was now the Sultan.
His other son Prince Cem Sultan raised a revolt against
his brother.
When the revolt failed, Prince Cem Sultan sought refuge
in the crusaders' Bodrum castle.

Various extensions and reconstructions continued for
at least a century.
In the early 1500s the
Tomb of King Mausulos,
one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World,
was finally disassembled in the quest to fortify the castle.
Its stones had been used in the initial construction,
and by 1522 the last of them were used.

The castle fell to Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522.
The knights withdrew to Malta, and the Ottoman Empire
took control of Bodrum and the Castle of Saint Peter.
It was used as a military base by the Turks through the 1800s.
It was a Turkish army base in 1824 during the Greek Revolt.
In 1895 it was converted into a prison.

It was an Italian garrison 1917-1921, but the Italians
withdrew when Atatürk came to power.
It stood empty for 40 years,
becoming the Museum of Underwater Archaeology in 1962.

As they wrote,
"Poor hygiene with dirty hands, contamination of the food
and water supplies with faecal material, inadequate
disposal of the faecal material, and consumption of
unwashed vegetables fertilized with human faeces
are some of the means through uhich
roundworms and whipworms are spread."

Other studies
report that 15 to 20 percent of nobles and the clergy died
from malnutrition and disease during the Crusades.
The authors of the study poing out that the soldiers
would have been even worse off.
"It is quite likely that a heavy load of intestinal
parasites in soldiers on crusade expeditions and in
castles undergoing long sieges would have predisposed
to death from malnutrition.
This clearly has implications for our understanding of
health and disease on mediaeval military expeditions
such as the crusades."

My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001,
although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous
Toilet of the World page until
January 17, 2002.
Some time soon after that I split it into categories,
and the collection has grown ever since.

In December, 2010 I registered the
toilet-guru.com
domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.